The Meaning of Pragmatism: James on the Practical Consequences of Belief
Keywords:
Pragmatism, Pragmatic maxim, Practical, William James, Charles S. Peirce, Arthur O. Lovejoy, Theory of meaning.Abstract
In the third lecture of his 1907 Pragmatism, William James famously presented his pragmatic theory of meaning by posing the simple question "what difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true?" Accordingly, James's pragmatic method of clarifying the meaning of conceptions was simply to trace what he called their respective "practical consequences."
Jame's own application of his pragmatic method, however, has turned out to be prone to invite questions of what exactly he understood by the central notion of "practical consequences." Already in 1908, Arthur O. Lovejoy proposed that James confounds two incrogruent criteria of the meaningfulness of propositions. According to the first criterion, a proposition is meaningful if it refers or predicts future experiences regardless of whether the proposition is believed or not; according to the second, a proposition is meningful if belief in that proposition results in some experiences on the part of the believer, despite the fact no predications by way of future experiences can be deduced from its truth. Many sympathetic commentators have since followed Lovejoy's exampke in holding that there is a duality inherent to James's pragmatism about meaning. Consequently, James has often be regarded as aloowing for merely subjective emotions and interests to play a role in the pragmatism determination of not only the meaning but the truth of the proposition.
In this paper, I will argue that Lovejoy's objection is mistaken in its mains claim. The two criteria Lovejoy separates are not incongruent; rather, by pragmatist lights, they are inseparably related. If a proposition has meaning in the light of the first criterion, it is meaningful by the second, and vice versa. Aside arguing for the consistency of James's view, it is shown that his pragmatism is far truer to Charles S. Peirce's original formulation of the pragmatic "third grade of clearness" than commonly supposed.
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